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Ives 2016 Spring Program Book IVES COLLECTIVE Season 2 is in the works! Collective Roy Malan, Susan Freier, violins; Nancy Ellis, viola; Stephen Harrison, cello; Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano Sunday, October 2, 2015, 3PM First Congregational Church , Palo Alto Sunday,Please October save 23, 2016,these 4PM dates! Old First Church, San Francisco FallJoaquin Turina: Il Circculo for Piano Trio, Op.91 Ernst von Dohnányi: Quartet No. 2 in Db Major, Op.15 Gabriel Fauré: Piano Quartet No.2 in G minor, Op.45 Collective Kay Stern, violin; Susan Freier, violin/viola; Stephen Harrison, cello; Susan Vollmer, horn; Julie Gregorian, bassoon; Roman Fukshansky, clarinet; Arnold Gregorian, string bass; Guest piano, TBA. Friday, January 27, 2017, 8PM St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto Sunday, January 29, 2016, 4PM WinterOld First Church, San Francisco It’s all Beethoven! String Trio in C minor, Op.9, No. 3; Piano Quartet in Eb Major, Op.16 ; Septet, Op.20 Collective Susan Freier, viola; Stephen Harrison, cello; Elizabeth Schumann, piano; Susanne Mentzer, mezzo-soprano Friday May 5, 2017, 8PM St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto Sunday, May 7, 2017, 4PM Old First Church, San Francisco SpringOttorino Respighi: Il Tramonto Johannes Brahms: Songs for voice, viola and piano, Op.91 Johannes Brahms: Piano Quartet in C minor, Op.60 2 Collective IVES COLLECTIVE Roy Malan, Susan Freier, violins; Evan Buttemer, viola Stephen Harrison, cello; Kenneth Goodson, baritone; Laura Dahl, piano A Celebration of Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Serenade for String Quartet, Op. 1 (1928) Un poco adagio - Allegro con moto Andante con motoSpring Dance: Allegro giocoso Dover Beach for Voice and String Quartet, Op. 3 (1931) Poem by Matthew Arnold (1867) Sonata for Cello and Piano in E Minor, Op. 6 (1932) Allegro Adagio Allegro appassionato Intermission Three Songs for Voice and Piano, Op. 10 (1935-6) Poems from James Joyce’s Chamber Music (1907) “Rain Has Fallen” “Sleep Now” “I Hear an Army” String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11 (1936) Molto allegro e appassionato Molto adagio Molto allegro This performance is sponsored in part by a grant from The Ross McKee Foundation. 3 The Chamber Music of Samuel Barber Samuel Barber composed surprisingly little chamber music, and nearly all of what he did write comes from very early in his career. The only piece of chamber music that Barber composed after the age of 30 was his 1955 Summer Music for Wind Quintet. This concert presents all of Barber’s extant chamber music that involves strings (a 1928 Sonata for Violin and Piano was destroyed by the composer), in addition to three settings of poems from James Joyce’s collection Chamber Music. These works were either written while Barber was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music or during the two years that he spent at the American Academy in Rome immediately after his graduation from Curtis in 1934. These are the works that established Barber as a major figure in American music. Barber’s chamber works were his first to be presented in public, his first to be published and his first to be recorded. Serenade for String Quartet, Op. 1 (1928) Barber was one of the very first students to enroll at the Curtis Institute when it opened in 1924. The fourteen-year old Barber would be based at Curtis for the next nine years, studyng composition, piano and voice. By the time he completed his Serenade, he had been working with the composer Rosario Scalero for almost two years. The charming piece is remarkably accomplished for a student work. While it is a commonplace to note that Barber seems entirely unaffected by the modernist trends of the 1920s (no hints of Stravinsky or Cowell here), it should also be empha- sized that even these early works don’t sound like older composers either. This is already a distinctive and original voice. The first movement opens with a slow introduction, the first gesture of which will turn out to provide the motivic material for the entire work. The following allegro is based on two themes, the first of which is the opening motive in a faster tempo, and the second, a lyrical melody in the viola, is the same motive, but upside-down. The slow movement similarly consists of two melodic statements, each heard twice, with the second a transformation of the motive from the previous movement. The concluding movement is a lively dance, in the character of a menuet, if faster than the old court dance, and more neoclassical in spirit than the rest of the piece. When the dance music repeats, Barber plays a wry trick on both players and audience by converting the original tune from triple meter to a four-beat pattern. The Serenade was first performed by the resident string quartet at Curtis at a concert of student works in 1930. The Curtis Quartet would later perform the Serenade on an all-Barber program for NBC radio in 1935, and, along with Dover Beach and the Cello Sonata, it was one of the works that secured Barber a contract with G. Schirmer to publish his music. 4 Dover Beach for Voice and String Quartet, Op. 3 (1931) Barber was probably inspired to write a piece for the unusual combination of voice and string quartet by his teacher Scalero, who had composed two pieces for voice and strings in the early 1920s. Barber was an avid reader of poetry, and songs would form a major part of his future output. Dover Beach stands out from Barber’s other songs both by virtue of its instrumentation and also by its use of a Victorian poem. Matthew Arnold’s well-known lyric poem comes from the middle of the 19th century and apparently appealed to Barber for its pessimism. The young composer responded to the poem very directly and literally. The opening stanza, in which the seashore is described as seen, smelled and heard, begins with a rocking figure in the second violin that evokes the lapping of waves, and the texture changes to high- light the moon shining on the far shore, and the invitation to smell the sweet night air and (most strikingly) to listen to roar of shifting pebbles. The prevailing mood of both song and poem is melancholic. The waves bring an “eternal note of sadness,” Sophocles hears “human misery” in the Aegean Sea, and faith has receded like the tide, leaving the world without joy or light. The one, brief, consolation that we are offered is the hope of human love. This hope can seem inadequate in the poem, but Barber’s passionate and agitated setting of the line suggests that this was the central message for him. Dover Beach was first performed by the Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton, who was doing a graduate program at Curtis in the early 1930s. For years, Dover Beach was only sung by Bampton, or by the composer himself, who made a beautiful recording of it with the Curtis Quartet for RCA in 1935. Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 6 (1932) The last of the three student works that comprise the first half of the program is the Sonata for Cello and Piano. The Sonata was written for Barber’s friend and Curtis classmate Orlando Cole, a founding member of the Curtis Quartet who would teach at Curtis until 2005 (he died in 2010 at the age of 101). Barber collaborated closely with Cole while composing and revising the sonata, producing a work that is idiom- atic and gratifying for the cello. In Cole’s words, the sonata is “ very cellistic, very singing. It takes advantage of the best qualities of the instrument.” The first movement has two themes, strongly contrasting in character, with one rest- less and agitated and the other noble and singing. Even for a composer known for lyricism and for vocal music, this second theme stands out as one of Barber’s most compelling. Both times that it is presented it is sung first by the cello, and then set as a canon led by the piano. The second movement is a scherzo “sandwich,” with a fleet (and rhythmically tricky) middle section surrounded by two statements of an 5 adagio melody (added to the movement as an afterthought). The final movement is again primarily impassioned, with a few respites in a scherzando character. The first performances of the sonata were by Cole and Barber, including a 1933 League of Composers concerts in New York, but the work was quickly taken up by other cellists, including Luigi Silva, Felix Salmond (Cole’s teacher and later col- league) and Gregor Piatigorsky, who recorded it twice. Three Songs, Op. 10 (1935-36) Barber was awarded the Prix de Rome as the “most talented and deserving student of music in America” in 1935 (one of the works that he submitted for the award was the cello sonata), and he spent the next two years at the American Academy in Rome, a very welcome change after nearly a decade at Curtis. Upon arriving in Rome, he initially concentrated on composing songs, including six songs to texts from James Joyce’s appropriately titled collection of love poems, Chamber Music (Joyce’s claim that the title referred to a chamber pot, rather than to music, appears to have been an inspiration that postdates the poems). Barber was drawn to Irish poetry in general, and was particularly immersed in Joyce while in Rome. The three Joyce settings published as Op. 10, like Dover Beach, effectively evoke the primary emotions of the songs and also highlight crucial words or phrases. One example is the phrase “sleep now” in the second song, which is always set to a descending third, setting it apart as an injunction.
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